Second Semester First photo Assignment: Part 1

This assignment was done in Photoshop and it focused on Hard and Soft Editing. 

I don't really know if the terms Hard and Soft editing are a thing, but I needed a way to distinguish between the two for my new Photoshoppers. Photoshop is becoming synonymous with memes, which are crazy wild edits, that if we are being honest have gotten a little out of control. But photoshop can also be used for subtle editing, where it still looks clean and realistic.

Soft editing- light editing. This is only to improve the color, sharpen your image, fix the contrast, and so on.... 

Hard editing- Go nuts. Anything you can do in photoshop without leaving gaping white holes in your images will fly. In this assignment, however, I do encourage them to see what they can do their picture only using the the tools available in the program. Just so they can become more familiar with where things are. 

For our first lesson, where we edit photos, the students have taken themselves, we use both Lightroom and PhotoShop. This post is all about PhotoShop, the next one will be about our light room portion. 

To go get them taking pictures with a purpose I gave them a prompt list. They did not need to use these for the assignment, but when they have them, then we have a better chance of a better variety of picture getting taken. 

Picture Scavenger Hunt:

take a picture of ...

only a part of someones face

with no ground in it 

of a tree

hands in the front

holding the camera upside down

while lying on your back

someone jumping

the floor.... but make it look like the ceiling 

through a window

a shadow 

the back of someones head

shallow focus

where someone is mad 

through something

someone walking

someone laughing

Then we go into photoshop. 

Their assignment is to complete 6 edits. 

3 soft edits 

3 hard edits 

These are examples of Soft edits: These were just edited to change the colors, the bright or sharpen, but nothing drastic was done to them, and minimal filter use was applied. 

These are "Hard Edits". In these edits kids were pretty much told to get photoshop out of their system. Go nuts. Edit till you are blue in the face. Students who have never used photoshop before, really need this time to play. Other wise you will see this repressed photoshop